‘Absolutely Disgusting’: Keep a Close Eye on the Cop’s Reaction as a Black Friday Shopper Claims That He’s Being Harassed Like ‘Mike Brown’

What does the shooting death of an 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri, have to do with a shopper in a Pennsylvania Wal-Mart?

Quite a lot, if you ask the shopper.

When a man was detained on Black Friday and asked to prove that he had paid for his merchandise, he quickly got his friend to start recording and invoked the name of Michael Brown as he defended himself against the police.

The problem: as the video shows, the police officer talking to the shopper remains extraordinarily calm, even as the shopper yells at him and refuses to comply with his requests.

According to the video description posted on YouTube, the officer is Michael Manfredi of the South Strabane Police Department in Washington County, Pennsylvania.

The officer has apparently been called to the Wal-Mart by the store’s security team, and he calmly follows the shopper to the parking lot as the shopper loudly refuses to hand the officer his receipt.

The shopper waves the receipt in front of the officer’s face, but he doesn’t allow the officer to hold the receipt or even take a picture of it.

Soon, despite no apparent aggression from the officer, the shopper starts running around the parking lot yelling at the top of his lungs.

The police officer’s calm remains strong through the end of the encounter, when he allows the shopper to go free — even though the man kept refusing to let him hold the receipt.

Watch the encounter below (content warning: strong language):

On Reddit, commenters responded with disgust that someone would invoke the name of the slain Brown to justify not showing a cop a receipt on Black Friday.

“As someone who works Asset Protection at a retail store, I can almost guarantee that whoever was attempting to stop these two and got officers involved had probable cause to do so,” one person wrote on Reddit. “I’m assuming that this was on Black Friday and after purchasing some of their merchandise they went back into the store and placed a few more items into their cart and attempted to leave the store.”

The top comment on Reddit was more succinct: “Absolutely disgusting. He should be ashamed of himself.”

Another commenter speculated, “He’s probably too dumb to be ashamed, or more likely has his head too far up his own a** to hear anyone telling him so. F******g ridiculous idiot.”